Two-Sided State-Space Models for Sequential Recommendation with Non-Random Multimodal Review Feedback

Abstract

Two-sided digital platforms are inherently dynamic: user preferences shift, item popularity evolves, and reviews both reflect and drive these changes. Yet most sequential recommendation systems treat reviews as passive signals for updating user states, leaving two aspects underexplored. First, review generation is nonrandom, depending on evolving latent states of both users and items. Second, reviews can reshape item states, induce spillover across related items, and influence future user decisions. To address these gaps, we propose a two-sided state-space model (TS-SSM) for event-conditioned sequential recommendation. TS-SSM consists of three components: (1) a modality-missing-not-at-random fusion module that encodes review content and informative observation patterns; (2) user-state evolution with temporal variation and local graph message passing that uses related item states to refine user preferences; and (3) item-state evolution with asymmetric carryover of positive and negative review feedback. In experiments across six Amazon categories, TS-SSM increases Recall@20 over BSARec by 14.8%--18.8% and exceeds HM4SR by 11.7% on average. On Goodreads Fantasy, Recall@20 improves HM4SR from .5191 to .5847. Ablations highlight distinct contributions of observation patterns, local propagation, and item dynamics.